"Dear Doctor:"I thought you had quite forgotten me. I have a pleasant recollection of your visit in the summer. Indeed, it made me understand for the first time that even a Bank Holiday need not be a day of wrath and mourning. Do repeat your visit. And as I know you are always so busy telling people how perfectly healthy they are, come next Sunday to tea at five. I shall keep out the clamouring crowd, so that we may discuss any high matter that occurs to us."Yours sincerely,"Ruby Chepstow."
"Dear Doctor:
"I thought you had quite forgotten me. I have a pleasant recollection of your visit in the summer. Indeed, it made me understand for the first time that even a Bank Holiday need not be a day of wrath and mourning. Do repeat your visit. And as I know you are always so busy telling people how perfectly healthy they are, come next Sunday to tea at five. I shall keep out the clamouring crowd, so that we may discuss any high matter that occurs to us."
Yours sincerely,
"Ruby Chepstow."
It was Wednesday when Isaacson read, and re-read, this note. He regretted the days that must intervene before the Sunday came. For he feared to repent his betrayal. And the note did not banish this fear. More than once he did repent. Then he and Nigel met and again he gave conscious help to his heart. He did not speak to Nigel of the projected visit, and Nigel did not say anything more about Mrs. Chepstow. Isaacson wondered at this reserve, which seemed to him unnatural in Nigel. More than once he found himself thinking that Nigel regretted what he had said about the possibility of Mrs. Chepstow visiting Egypt. But of this he could not be sure. On Sunday, at a few minutes past five, he arrived at the Savoy, and was taken to Mrs. Chepstow's room.
The autumn darkness had closed over London, and when he came into the room, which was empty, the curtains were drawn, the light shone, a fire was blazing on the hearth. Not far from it was placed a tea-table, close to a big sofa which stood out at right angles from the wall.
There were quantities of white carnations in vases on the mantel-piece, on the writing-table, and on the top of the rosewood piano. The piano was shut, and no "Gerontius" was visible.
Meyer Isaacson stood for a moment looking round, feeling the atmosphere of this room, or at least trying to feel it. In the summer had it not seemed a little lonely, a little dreary, a chamber to escape from, despite its comfort and pretty colours? Now it was bright, cosy, even hopeful. Yes, he breathed a hopeful atmosphere.
A door clicked. Mrs. Chepstow came in.
She wore a rose-coloured dress, cut very high at the throat, with tight sleeves that came partly over her hands, emphasizing their attractive delicacy. The dress was very plainly made and seemed moulded to her beautiful figure. She had no hat on, but Isaacson had never before been so much struck by her height. As she came in, she looked immensely tall. And there was some marked change in her appearance. For an instant he did not know what it was. Then he saw that she had given to her cheeks an ethereal flush of red. This altered her extraordinarily. It made her look younger, more brilliant, but also much less refined. She smiled gaily as she took his hand. She enveloped him at once with a definite cheerfulness which came to him as a shock. As she held his hand, she touched the bell. Then she drew him down on the sofa, with a sort of coaxing cordiality.
"This shall be better than Bank Holiday," she said. "I know you pitied me then. You wondered how I could bear it. Now I've shut out the river. I'm glad you never came again till I could have the lights and the fire. I love the English winters, don't you, because one has to do such delicious things to keep all thought of them out. Now, in the hot places abroad, that people are always raving about, all the year round one can never have a room like this, an hour like this by a clear fire, with thick curtains drawn—and a friend."
As she said the last three words, her voice had a really beautiful sound in it, and a sound that was surely beautiful because of some moral quality it contained or suggested. More than a whole essay of Emerson's did this mere sound suggest friendship. The leaves of the book of this woman's attractions were being turned one by one for Isaacson. And of all her attractions her voice perhaps was the greatest.
The waiter came in with tea. When he had gone, the Doctor could speak.
But he scarcely knew what to say. Very seldom was his self-possession disturbed. To-day he felt at a disadvantage. The depression, perhaps chiefly physical, which had lately been brooding over him, and which had become acute at the concert, deepened about him to-day, made him feel morally small. Mrs. Chepstow's cheerfulness seemed like height. For a moment in all ways she towered above him, and even her bodily height seemed like a mental triumph, or a triumph of her will over his.
"But this is only autumn," he said.
"We can pretend it is winter."
She gave him his cup of tea, with the same gesture that had charmed Nigel on the day when he first visited her. Then she handed him a plate with little bits of lemon on it.
"I've found out your tastes, you see. I know you never take milk."
He was obliged to feel grateful. Yet something in him longed to refuse the lemon, the something that never ceased from denouncing her. He uttered the right banality:
"How good of you to bother about me!"
"But you bother about me, and on your only free day! Don't you think I am grateful to you?"
There was no mockery in her voice. Today her irony was concealed, but, like a carefully-covered fire, he knew it was burning still. And because it was covered he resented it. He resented this comedy they were playing, the insincerity into which she was smilingly leading him. She could not imagine that she deceived him. She was far too clever for that. Then what was the good of it all?—that she had put him, that she kept him, at a disadvantage.
She handed him the muffins. She ministered to him as if she wanted to pet him. Again he had to feel grateful. Even in acute dislike men must be conscious of real charm in a woman. And Isaacson did not know how to ignore anything that was beautiful. Had the Devil come to him—with a grace, he must have thought, "How graceful is the Devil!" Now he was charmed by her gesture. Nevertheless, being a man of will, and, in the main, a man who was very sincere, he called up his hard resolutions, and said:
"No, I don't think you are grateful. I don't think you are the woman to be grateful without a cause."
"Or with one," he mentally added.
"But here is the cause!"
She touched his sleeve. And suddenly, with that touch, all her charm for him vanished, and he was angry with her for daring to treat him like those boys by whom she had been surrounded, for daring to think that she could play upon the worst in him.
"I'm afraid you are mistaken," he said. "I am no cause for your gratitude."
She looked more cordial and natural even than before.
"But I think you are. For you don't really like me, and yet you come to see me. That is unselfishness."
"Only supposing what you say were true, and that you did like me."
"I do like you."
She said it quite simply, without emphasis. And even to him it sounded true.
"Some day perhaps you will know it."
"But—I do not believe it."
He had recovered from the stroke of her greatest weapon, her voice.
"That does not matter. What is matters, not what some one thinks is, or is not."
"Yes," he said. "What is matters. I have come here, not to pay a formal call, or even a friendly visit, but, perhaps, to commit an impertinence."
She smilingly moved her head, and handed him her cigarette-case.
"No, you would never do that."
He hesitated to take a cigarette—and now her bright eyes frankly mocked him, and said, "A cigarette commits you to nothing!" Certainly she knew how to make him feel almost like an absurd and awkward boy; or was it his feeling of overwork, of physical depression, that was disarming him today?
"Thank you."
He lighted a cigarette, and she lighted another, still with a happy air.
"How do you know that?" he asked.
"I feel it."
With a little laugh, she reminded him of his saying about women.
"You are wrong. I am going to do it," he said.
"But—do you really think it an impertinence?"
He was beset by his sensitive dislike to mix in other people's affairs, but almost angrily he overcame it.
"I don't know. You may. Mrs. Chepstow, you were raving just now about the delights of the English winter—"
"Shut out!" she interpolated.
"Then why should you avoid them?"
"And who says I am going to?"
"Are not you going to Egypt?"
She settled herself in the angle of the sofa.
"Would it be the wrong climate for me, Doctor Isaacson?"
She put an emphasis on "Doctor."
"I am not talking as a doctor."
"Then as a friend—or as an enemy?"
"As a friend—of his."
"Of whom?"
"Of Nigel Armine."
"Because he is working in the Fayyūm, may not I go up the Nile?"
"If you were on the Nile, Armine would not be in the Fayyūm."
"You are anxious about his reclaiming of the desert? Have you put money into his land scheme?"
"You think I only care for money?" he said, nettled, despite himself, at the sound of knowledge in her voice.
"What do you know of me?"
"And you—of me?"
She still spoke lightly, smilingly. But he thought of the inexorable beating of that pulse of life—of life, and the will to live as her philosophy desired.
"I don't wish to speak of any knowledge I may have of you. But—leave Armine in the Fayyūm."
"Did he say I was going to Egypt?"
"He spoke of it once only. Then he said you might go."
"Anything else?"
"He said that if you did go he would look after you."
She sat looking at him in silence.
"And—why not?" she said at last, as he said nothing more.
"Others have—looked after you."
Her face did not change.
"Doesn't he know it?" she said.
"And he isn't like—others."
"I know what he is like."
When she said that, Isaacson hated her, hated her for her woman's power of understanding, and, through her understanding, of governing men.
"What does he mean by—looking after you?" he said.
And now, almost without knowing it, he spoke sternly, and his dark face was full of condemnation.
"What did you mean when you said that 'others' have done it?"
"Then it is that!"
Isaacson had not meant to speak the words, but they escaped from his lips. No passing light in her eyes betrayed that she had caught the reflection of the thought that lay behind them.
"Men! Men!" his mind was saying. "And—even Armine!"
"You are afraid for the Fayyūm?" she said.
"Oh, Mrs. Chepstow!" he began, with a sudden vehemence that suggested the unchaining of a nature. Then he stopped. Behind his silence there was a flood of words—words to describe her temperament and Armine's, her mode of life and Armine's, what she deserved—and he; words that would have painted for Mrs. Chepstow not only the good in Isaacson's friend, but also the secret good in Isaacson, shown in his love of it, his desire to keep it out of the mud. And it was just this secret good that prevented Isaacson from speaking. He could not bear to show it to this woman. Instinctively she knew, appreciated, what was, perhaps, not high-minded in him. Let her be content with that knowledge. He would not make her the gift of his goodness.
And—to do so would be useless.
"Yes?" she said.
She sat up on the sofa. She was looking lightly curious.
"If you do go to the Nile, let me wish you a happy winter."
He was once more the self-possessed Doctor so many women liked.
"If I go, I shall know how to make him happy," she replied, echoing his cool manner, despite her more earnest words.
He got up. Again he hated her for her knowledge of men. He hated her so much that he longed to be away from her. Why should she be allowed to take a life like Armine's into her soiled hands, even if she could make him happy for a time, being a mistress of deception?
"Good-bye."
He just touched her hand.
"Good-bye. I am grateful. You know why."
Again she sent him that cordial smile. He left her standing up by the hearth. The glow from the flames played over her rose-coloured gown. Her beautiful head was turned towards the door to watch him go. In one hand she held her cigarette. Its tiny wreath of smoke curled lightly about her, mounting up in the warm, bright room. Her figure, the shape of her head, her eyes—they looked really lovely. She was still the "Bella Donna" men had talked about so long. But as he went out, he saw the tiny wrinkles near her eyes, the slight hardness about her cheekbones, the cynical droop at the corners of her mouth.
Armine did not see them. He could not make Armine see them. Armine saw only the beauties she possessed. His concentration on them made for blindness.
And yet even he had his ugliness. For now Isaacson believed in the liaison between him and Mrs. Chepstow.
Only eight days later, after Mrs. Chepstow and Nigel had sailed for Alexandria, did he learn that they were married.
Immediately after their marriage at a registrar's office, Nigel and his wife, with a maid, and a great many trunks of varying shapes and sizes, travelled to Naples and embarked on theHohenzollernfor Egypt, where Nigel had rented for the winter the Villa Androud, on the bank of the Nile near Luxor.
Nigel was happy, but he was not wholly free from anxiety, although he was careful to keep that anxiety from his wife, and desired even sometimes to deny that it existed to himself. In making this marriage he had obeyed the cry of two voices within him, the voice of the senses and the voice of the soul. He did not know which had sounded most clearly; he did not know which inclination had prevailed over him most strongly, the longing for a personal joy, or the pitiful desire to shed happiness and peace on a darkened and soiled existence. The future perhaps would tell him. Meanwhile he put before him one worthy aim, to be the perfect husband.
Although the month was November, and the rush for the Nile had not begun, theHohenzollernwas crowded with passengers, and when the Armines came into the dining-room for lunch, as the vessel was leaving Naples, every place was already taken.
"Give us a table upstairs alone," said Nigel to the head-steward, putting something into his hand. "We shall like that ever so much better."
He had caught sight of a number of staring English faces, on some of which there seemed to be more than the dawning of a recognition of Mrs. Armine.
As if mechanically the rosy Prussian retained the something, and replied, with a strong German accent:
"I must give you the table at the top of the staircase, sir, but I cannot promise that you will be alone. If there are any more to come, they will have to sit with you."
"Anyhow, put us there."
"Pray that we have this to ourselves for the voyage, Ruby," said Nigel, a moment later, as they sat side by side on a white settee close to the open door which led out on to the deck at the top of the main companion.
As he finished speaking, a steward appeared, quickly conducting to their table a tall and broad young man, who made them a formal bow, and composedly sat down opposite to them.
He was remarkably well dressed in clothes which must have been cut by an English tailor, and which he wore with a carelessness almost English, but also with an easy grace that was utterly foreign. Thin, with mighty shoulders and an exceptionally deep chest, it was obvious that his strength must be enormous. His neck looked as powerful as a bull's, and his rather small head was poised upon it with a sort of triumphant boldness. His hair was black and curly, his forehead very broad, his nose short, straight, and determined, with wide and ardent nostrils. Under a small but dense moustache his lips were thick and rather pouting. His chin, thrust slightly forward in a manner almost aggressive, showed the dusk of close-shaven hair. The tint of his skin, though dark, was clear—had even something of delicacy. His hands, broad, brown, and muscular, had very strong-looking fingers which narrowed slightly at the tips. His eyes were large and black, were set in his head with an almost singular straightness, and were surmounted by brows which, depressed towards the nose, sloped upwards towards the temples. These brows gave to the eyes beneath them, even to the whole face, a curiously distinctive look of open resolution, which was seizing, and attractive or unattractive according to the temperament of the beholder.
He took up thecarte du jour, studied it at length and with obvious care, then gave an order in excellent French, which the steward hastened away to carry out. This done, he twisted his moustaches and looked calmly at his companions, not curiously, but rather as if he regarded them with a polite indifference, and merely because they were near him. Mrs. Armine seemed quite unaware of his scrutiny, but Nigel spoke to him almost immediately, making some remark about the ship in English. The stranger answered in the same language, but with a strong foreign accent. He seemed quite willing to talk. He apologized for interrupting their tête-à-tête, but said he had no choice, as the saloon was completely full. They declared they were quite ready for company, Nigel with his usual sympathetic geniality, Mrs. Armine with a sort of graceful formality beneath which—or so her husband fancied—there was just a suspicion of reluctance. He guessed that she would have much preferred a private table, but when he said so to her, as they were taking their coffee on deck, she answered:
"No, what does it matter? We shall so soon be in our own house. Tell me about the villa, Nigel, and Luxor. You know I have never seen it."
With little more than a word she had deftly flicked the intruding stranger out of their lives, she had concentrated herself on Nigel. He felt that all her force, like a strong and ardent stream, was flowing into the new channel which he had cut for her. He obeyed her. He told her about Egypt. And as he talked, and watched her listening, he began to feel thoroughly for the first time the vital change in his life, and something within him rejoiced, that was surely his manhood singing.
The voyage passed swiftly by, attended by perfect weather, calm, radiant, blue—weather that releases humanity from any bonds of depression into a joyous world. Yet for the Armines it was not without an unpleasant incident. Among the passengers were a Lord and Lady Hayman, whom Nigel Armine knew, and whom Mrs. Armine had known in the days when London had loved her. It was impossible not to meet them, equally impossible not to perceive their cold confusion at each encounter, shown by a sudden interest in empty seas and unpopulated horizons. That they mistook the situation was so evident to Nigel that one day he managed to confront Lord Hayman in the smoke-room and to have it out with him.
"Congratulate you, I'm sure, congratulate you!" murmured that gentleman, whose practical brown eyes became suddenly wells full of ironical amazement. "Tell my wife at once. Knew nothing at all about it."
He got away, with a moribund cigar between his teeth, and no doubt informed Lady Hayman, who thereafter bowed to Nigel, but with a reluctant muscular movement that adequately expressed an inward moral surprise mingled with condemnation. Mrs. Armine seemed totally undisturbed by these demonstrations, her only comment upon the lady being that it was really strange that "in these days" any one could be found to wear magenta and red together, especially any one with a complexion like Lady Hayman's. And her astonishment at the triple combination of colours seemed so simple, so sincere, that it had to be believed in as merely an emanation from an artistic temperament. It was probable that the Haymans told other English on theHohenzollernthe news of Nigel's marriage, for several of the faces that had stared from the luncheon-tables continued to stare on the deck, but with a slightly different expression; the sheer, dull curiosity being exchanged for that half-satirical interest with which the average person of British blood regards a newly-married couple.
This contemplation of them made Nigel secretly angry, and awoke in him a great and peculiar tenderness for his wife, founded on a suddenly more acute understanding of the brutality of the ostracism, combined with notoriety, which she had endured in recent years. Now at last she had some one to protect her. His heart enfolded her with ample wings. But he longed to be free from this crowd, from which on a ship they could not escape, and they spoke to no one during the voyage except to their companion at meals.
With him they were soon on the intimate terms of shipboard—terms that commit one to nothing in the future when land is reached. Although he was dressed like an Englishman, and on deck wore a straw hat with the word "Scott" inside it, he soon let them know that his name was Mahmoud Baroudi, that his native place was Alexandria, that he was of mixed Greek and Egyptian blood, and that he was a man of great energy and will, interested in many schemes, pulling the strings of many enterprises.
He spoke always with a certain polite but bold indifference, as if he cared very little what impression he made on others; and all the information that he gave about himself was dropped out in a careless, casual way that seemed expressive of his character. The high rank, the great riches of his father he rather implied than definitely mentioned. Only when he talked of his occupations was he more definite, more strongly personal. Nigel gathered that he was essentially a man of affairs, had nothing in common with the typical lazy Eastern, who loves to sit in the sun, to suffer the will of Allah, and to fill the years with dreams; that he was cool, clear-headed, and full of the marked commercial ability characteristic of the modern Greek. Whether this aptitude was combined with the sinuous cunning that is essentially Oriental Nigel did not know. He certainly could not perceive it. All that Baroudi said was said with clearness, and a sort of acute precision, whether he discussed the land question, the irrigation works on the Nile, the great boom of 1906, in which such gigantic fortunes were made, or the cotton and sugar industries, in both of which he was interested. The impression he conveyed to Nigel was that he was born to "get on" in whatever he undertook, and that in almost any form of activity he could be a fine ally, or an equally fine opponent. That he was fond of sport was soon apparent. He spoke with an enthusiasm that was always mingled with a certain sereneinsoucianceof the horses he had bred and of the races he had won in Alexandria and Cairo, of yachting, of big-game shooting up the Nile beyond Khartum in the country of the Shillouks, and of duck, pigeon, and jackal shooting in the Fayyūm and on the sacred Lake of Kurun.
Nigel found him an excellent fellow, the most sympathetic and energetic man of Eastern blood whom he had ever encountered. Mrs. Armine spoke of him more temperately; he did not seem to interest her, and Nigel was confirmed by her lack of appreciation in an idea that had already occurred to him. He believed that Baroudi was a man who did not care for women, except, no doubt, as the occasional and servile distractions of an unoccupied hour in the harem. He was always very polite to Mrs. Armine, but when he talked he soon, as if almost instinctively, addressed himself to Nigel; and once or twice, when Mrs. Armine left them alone together over their coffee and cigars, he seemed to Nigel to become another man, to expand almost into geniality, to be not merely self-possessed—that faculty never failed him—but to be more happily at his ease, more racy, more ready for intimacy. Probably he was governed by the Oriental's conception of woman as an inferior sex, and was unable to be quite at home in the complete equality and ease of the English relation with women.
When theHohenzollernsighted Alexandria, Baroudi went below for a moment. He reappeared wearing the fez. They bade each other good-bye in the harbour, with the usual vague hopes of a further meeting that do duty on such occasions, and that generally end in nothing.
Mrs. Armine seemed glad to be rid of him and to be alone with her husband.
"Don't let us stay in Cairo," she said. "I want to go up the river. I want to be in the Villa Androud."
After one night at Shepheard's they started for Luxor, or rather for Keneh, where they got out in the early morning to visit the temple of Denderah, taking a later train which brought them to Luxor towards evening, just as the gold of the sunset was beginning to steal into the sky and to cover the river with glory.
Mrs. Armine was fatigued by the journey, and by the long day at Denderah, which had secretly depressed her. She looked out of the window of their compartment at the green plains of doura, at the almost naked brown men bending rhythmically by the shadûfs, at the children passing on donkeys, and the women standing at gaze with corners of their dingy garments held fast between their teeth; and she felt as if she still saw the dark courts of Hathor's dwelling, as if she still heard the cries of the enormous bats that inhabit them. When the train stopped, she got up slowly, and let Nigel help her down to the platform.
"Is the villa far away?" she said, looking round on the crowd of staring Egyptians.
"No, I want you to walk to it. Do you mind?"
His eyes demanded a "no," and she gave it him with a good grace that ought to have been written down to her credit by the pen of the recording angel. They set out to walk to the villa. As they went through the little town, Nigel pointed out the various "objects of interest": the antiquity shops, where may be purchased rings, necklaces, and amulets, blue and green "servants of the dead," scarabs, winged discs, and mummy-cases; the mosque, a Coptic church, cafés, the garden of the Hôtel de Luxor. He greeted several friends of humble origin: the black barber who called himself "Mr. White"; Ahri Achmed, the Folly of Luxor, who danced and gibbered at Mrs. Armine and cried out a welcome in many languages; Hassan, the one-eyed pipe-player; and Hamza, the praying donkey-boy, who in winter stole all the millionaires from his protesting comrades and in summer sat with the dervishes in the deep shadows of the mosques.
"You seem to be as much at home here as in London," said Mrs. Armine, in a voice that was rather vague.
"Ten times more, Ruby. And so will you be soon. I love a little place."
"Yes?"
After a pause she added:
"Are there many villas here?"
"Only two on the bank of the Nile. One belongs to a Dutchman. Our villa is the other."
"Only two—and one belongs to a Dutchman!" she thought.
And she wondered about their winter.
"When I've settled you in, I must run off to the Fayyûm to see how the work is going, and rig up something for you. I want to take you there soon, but it's really in the wilds, and I didn't like to straight away. Besides I was afraid you might be dull and unhappy without any of your comforts. And I do want you to be happy."
There was an anxiety that was almost wistful in his voice.
"I do want you to like Egypt," he added, like an eager boy.
"I am sure I shall like it, Nigel. There's no Casino, I suppose!"
"Good heavens, no! What should one do with a Casino here!"
"Oh, they sometimes have one, even in places like this. A friend of mine who went to Biskra told me there was one there."
"Look at that, Ruby! That's better than any Casino—don't you think?"
They had turned to the left and come to the river bank.
All the Nile was flooded with gold, in which there were eddies of pale mauve and distant flushes of a red that resembled the red on the wing of a flamingo. The clear and radiant sky was drowned in a quivering radiance of gold, that was like a thing alive and sensitively palpitating. The far-off palms, the lofty river banks that framed the Nile's upper reaches, the birds that flew south, following the direction of the breeze, the bats that wheeled about the great columns of the temple, the boats that with wide-spread lateen sails went southward with the birds, were like motionless and moving jewels of black against the vibrant gold. And the crenellated mountains of Libya, beyond Thebes and the tombs of the Kings, stood like spectral sentinels at their posts till the pageant should be over.
"Isn't it wonderful, Ruby?"
"Yes," she said. "Quite wonderful."
She honestly thought it superb, but the dust in her hair and in her skirts, the lassitude that seemed to hang, almost like spiders' webs about wood, about the body which contained her tired spirit, restrained her enthusiasm from being a match for his. Perhaps she knew this and wished to come up with him, for she added, throwing a warm sound into her voice:
"It is exquisite. It is the most magical thing I have ever seen."
She touched her veil, as she spoke, and put up her hand to her hair behind. Two Frenchmen, talking with sonorous voices, were just then passing them on the road.
"I didn't know any sunset could be so marvellous."
She was still touching her hair, and now she felt clothed in dust; and, with the ardour of a fastidious woman who has not seen the inside of a dressing-room for twenty-four hours, she longed to be rid both of the sunset and of the man.
"Where is the villa, Nigel?"
"Not ten minutes away."
The spirit groaned within her, and she went resolutely forward, passing the Winter Palace Hotel.
"What a huge hotel—but it isn't open!" she said.
"It will be almost directly. We turn to the right down here."
Some large rats were playing on the uneven stones close to the river; from a little shed close by there came the dull puffing of an engine.
"Where on earth are we going, Nigel? This is only a donkey track."
"It's all right. Just wait a minute. There's the Dutchman's castle, and we are just beyond it. Am I walking too fast for you, Ruby?"
"No, no."
She hurried on. Her whole body was clamouring for warm water with a certain essence dissolved in it, for a change of stockings and shoes, for a tea-gown, for a sofa with a tea-table beside it, for a hundred and one things his manhood did not dream of.
"Here it is at last!" he said.
A tall and amiable-looking boy in a flowing gold-coloured robe suddenly appeared before them, holding open a wooden gate, through which they passed into a garden.
"Hulloh, Ibrahim!" cried Nigel.
"Hulloh, my gentleman!" returned the boy, inclining his body towards Mrs. Armine and touching his fez with his hand. "I am Ibrahim Ahmed, my lady, the special servant called a dragoman of my Lord Arminigel. I can read the hieroglyphs, and I am always young and cheerful."
He took Nigel's right hand, kissed it and placed it against his forehead rapidly three times in succession, smiled, and looked sideways on the ground.
"I am always young and cheerful," he repeated, softly and dreamily. He picked a red rose from a bush, placed it between his white teeth, and turned to conduct them to the white house that stood in the midst of the garden perhaps a hundred yards away.
"What a nice boy!" said Mrs. Armine.
"He's been my dragoman before. This is our little domain."
Mrs. Armine saw a flat expanse of brown and sun-dried earth, completely devoid of grass, and divided roughly into sunken beds containing small orange-trees, mimosas, rose-bushes, poinsettias, and geraniums. It was bounded on three sides by earthen walls and on the fourth side by the Nile.
"Is it not beautiful, mees?" said Ibrahim.
Mrs. Armine began to laugh.
"He takes me for avieille fille!" she said. "Is it a compliment, Nigel? Ibrahim,"—she touched the boy's robe—"won't you give me that rose?"
"My lady, I will give you all what you want."
Already she had fascinated him. As she took the rose, which he offered with a salaam, she began to look quite gay.
"All what you want you must have," continued Ibrahim, gravely.
"Ibrahim reads my thoughts like a true Eastern!" said Nigel.
"What I want now is a bath," remarked Mrs. Armine, smelling the rose.
"Directly we have had one more look at the Nile from our own garden," exclaimed Nigel.
But she had stopped before the house.
"I can't take my bath in the Nile. Good-bye, Nigel!"
Before he could say a word she had crossed a little terrace, disappeared through a French window, and vanished into the villa.
Ibrahim smiled, hung his head, and then murmured in a deep contralto voice:
"The wife of my Lord Arminigel, she does not want Ibrahim any more, she does not want the Nile, she wants to be all alone."
He shook his head, which drooped on his long and gentle brown neck, sighed, and repeated dreamily:
"She wants to be all alone."
"We'll leave her alone for a little and go and look at the gold."
Meanwhile within the house Mrs. Armine was calling impatiently for her maid.
"For mercy's sake, undress me. I am a mass of dust, and looking perfectly dreadful. Is the bath ready?" she asked, as the girl, who had come running, showed her into a good-sized bedroom.
The maid, who was not the red-eyed maid Nigel had met at the Savoy, shrugged up her small shoulders, and extended her little, greedy hands.
"It is ready, madame; but the water—oh,là, là!"
"What's the matter. What do you mean?"
"The water is the colour of madame's morning chocolate."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Armine, almost with a sound of despair.
She sank into a chair, taking in with a glance every detail of the chamber, which had been furnished and arranged by a rich and consumptive Frenchman who had lived there with his mistress and had recently died at Cairo.
"Bring me the mirror from my dressing-case, and get me out of this gown."
Marie hastened to fetch the mirror, into which, after unpinning and removing her hat and veil, Mrs. Armine looked long and earnestly.
"There are no women servants, madame."
"All the servants here are men, madame, and all are as black as boots."
"Shut the door into monsieur's room, and don't chatter so much. My head is simply splitting."
"What are you doing? One would think you had never seen a corset before. Don't fumble! If you fumble, I shall pack you off to Paris by the first train to-morrow morning. Now where's the bath?"
Marie, wrinkling up her nose, which looked like a note of interrogation, led the way into the bathroom, and pointed to the water with a grimace.
"Voilà, madame!"
"Mon Dieu!" said Mrs. Armine.
She stared at the water, and repeated her exclamation.
"That makes pity to think that madame—"
"Have you put in theeau de paradis?"
"But certainly, madame."
"Very well then—ugh!"
She shuddered with disgust as the rich brown water of the Nile came up to her breast, to her chin.
"And to think that it looked golden," she murmured, "when we were standing on the bank!"
Soon after half-past eight that evening, when darkness lay over the Nile and over the small garden of the villa, a tall Nubian servant, dressed in white with a scarlet girdle, spread two prayer rugs on the terrace before the French windows of the drawing-room, and placed upon them a coffee-table and two arm-chairs. At first he put the chairs a good way apart, and looked at them very gravely. Then he set them quite close together, and relaxed into a smile. And before he had finished smiling, over the parquet floor behind him there came the light rustle of a dress. The Nubian servant turned round and gazed at Mrs. Armine, who had stopped beside a table and was looking about the room; a white-and-yellow room, gaily but rather sparsely furnished, that harmonized well with the fair beauty which moved the black man's soul.
He thought her very wonderful. The pallor of her face, the delicate lustre of her hair, quite overcame his temperament, and when she caught sight of him and smiled, and observed the contrast between the snowy white of his turban, his scarlet girdle and babouches, and the black lustre of his skin, with eyes that frankly admired, he compared her secretly to the little moon that lights up the Eastern night. He went softly to fetch the coffee, while she stepped out on to the terrace.
At first she stood quite still, and stared at the bit of garden which revealed itself in the darkness; at the dry earth, the untrimmed, wild-looking rose-bushes, and the little mimosa-trees, vague almost as pretty shadows. A thin, dark-brown dog, with pale yellow eyes, slunk in from the night and stood near her, trembling and furtively watching her. She had not seen it yet, for now she was gazing up at the sky, which was peopled with myriads of stars, those piercingly bright stars which look down from African skies. The brown dog trembled and blinked, keeping his yellow eyes upon her, looked self-consciously down sideways, then looked at her again.
From the hidden river there came a distant song of boatmen, one of those vehement and yet sad songs of the Nile that the Nubian waterman loves.
"Sh—sh—sh!"
Mrs. Armine had caught sight of the dog. She hissed at him angrily, and made a threatening gesture with her hands, which sent him slinking back to the darkness.
"What is it, Ruby?" called out a strong voice from above.
She started.
"Oh, are you there, Nigel?"
"Yes. What's the matter?"
"It was only a dreadful-looking dog. What are you doing up there?"
"I was looking at the stars. Aren't they wonderful to-night?"
There was in his voice a sound of warm yet almost childlike enthusiasm, with which she was becoming very familiar.
"Yes, marvellous. Oh, there's the dog again! Sh—sh—sh!"
"I'll come down and drive it away."
In a moment he was with her.
"Where is the little beast?"
"It's gone again. I frightened it. Oh, you've brought me a cloak, you thoughtful person."
She turned for him to put it round her, and as he began to do so, as he touched her arms and shoulders, his eyes shone and his brown cheeks slightly reddened. Then his expression changed; he seemed to repress, to beat back something; he drew her down into a chair, and quietly sat down by her. The Nubian came with coffee, and went softly away, smiling.
Mrs. Armine poured out the coffee, and Nigel lit his cigar.
"Turkish coffee for my lord and master!" she said, pushing a cup towards him over the little table. "I think I must learn how to make it."
He was gazing at her as he stretched out his hand to take it.
"Do you feel at home here, Ruby?" he asked her.
"It's such a very short time, you dear enquirer," she answered. "Remember I haven't closed an eye here yet. But I'm sure I shall feel at home. And what about you?"
"I scarcely know what I feel."
He sipped the coffee slowly.
"It's such a tremendous change," he continued. "And I've been alone so long. Of course, I've got lots of friends, but still I've often felt very lonely, as you have, Ruby, haven't you?"
"I've seldom felt anything else," she replied.
"But to-night—?"
"Oh, to-night—everything's different to-night. I wonder—"
She paused. She was leaning back in her chair, with her head against a cushion, looking at him with a slight, half-ironical smile in her eyes and at the corners of her lips.
"I wonder," she continued, "what Meyer Isaacson will think."
"Of our marriage?"
"Yes. Do you suppose it will surprise him?"
"I—no, I hardly think it will."
"You didn't hint it to him, did you?"
"I said nothing about any marriage, but he knew something of my feeling for you."
"All the same, I think he'll be surprised. When shall we get the first post from England telling us the opinion of the dear, kind, generous-hearted world?"
"Ruby, who cares what any one thinks or says?"
"Men often don't credit us with it, but we women, as a rule, are horribly sensitive, more sensitive than you can imagine. I—how I wish that some day your people would try to like me!"
He took one of her hands in his.
"Why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? But this winter we'll keep to ourselves, learn to know each other, learn to trust each other, learn to—to love each other in the very best and finest way. Ruby, I took this villa because I thought you would like it, that it would not be so bad as our first home. But presently I want you to come with me to Sennoures. When we've had our fortnight's honeymoon here, I'll go off for a few nights, and look into the work, and arrange something for you. I'll get a first-rate tent from Cairo. I want you in camp with me. And it's farther away there, wilder, less civilized; one gets right down to Nature. When I was in London, before I asked you to marry me, I thought of you at Sennoures. My camp used to be pitched near water, and at night, when the men slept covered up in their rugs and bits of sacking, and the camels lay in a line, with their faces towards the men's tent, eating, I used to come out, alone and listen to the frogs singing. It's like the note of a flute, and they keep it up all night, the beggars. You shall come out beside that water, and you shall hear it with me. It's odd how a little thing like that stirs up one's imagination. Why, even just thinking of that flute of the Egyptian Pan in the night—" He broke off with a sound that was not quite a laugh, but that held laughter and something else. "We've got, please God, a grand winter ahead of us, Ruby," he finished. "And far away from the world."
"Far—far away from the world!"
She repeated his words rather slowly.
"I must have some more coffee," she added, with a change of tone.
"Take care. You mayn't be able to sleep."
"Nigel—do you want me to sleep to-night?"
He looked at her, but he did not answer.
"Even if I don't sleep I must have it. Besides I always sit up late."
"But to-night you're tired."
"Never mind. I must have the coffee."
She poured it out and drank it.
"I believe you live very much in the present," he said.
"Well—you live very much in the future."
"Do I? What makes you think so?"
"My instinct informs me of the fact, and of other facts about you."
"You'll make me feel as if I were made of glass if you don't take care."
"Live a little more in the present. Live in the present to-night."
There was a sound of insistence in her voice, a look of insistence in her bright blue eyes which shone out from their painted shadows, a feeling of insistence in the thin and warm white hand which now she laid upon his. "Don't worry about the future."
He smiled.
"I wasn't worrying. I was looking forward."
"Why? We are here to-night, Nigel, to live as if we had only to-night to live. You talk of Sennoures. But who knows whether we shall ever see Sennoures, ever hear the Egyptian Pan by the water? I don't. You don't. But we do know we are here to-night by the Nile."
With all her force, but secretly, she was trying to destroy in him the spiritual aspiration which was essential in his nature, through which she had won him as her husband, but which now could only irritate and confuse her, and stand in the way of her desires, keeping the path against them.
"Yes," he said, drawing in his breath. "We are here to-night by the Nile, and we hear the boatmen singing."
The distant singers had been silent for some minutes; now their voices were heard again, and sounded nearer to the garden, as if they were on some vessel that was drifting down the river under the brilliant stars. So much nearer was the music that Mrs. Armine could hear a word cried out by a solo voice, "Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!" The voice was accompanied by a deep and monotonous murmur. The singer was beating adaraboukkehheld loosely between his knees. The chorus of nasal voices joined in with the rough and artless vehemence which had in it something that was sad, and something that, though pitiless, seemed at moments to thrill with yearning, like the cruelty of the world, which is mingled with the eternal longing for the healing of its wounds.
"We hear the boatmen singing," he repeated, "about Allah, and always Allah, Allah, the God of the Nile, and of us two on the Nile."
"Sh—sh! There's that dog again! I do wish—"
She had begun to speak with an abrupt and almost fierce nervous irritation, but she recovered herself immediately.
"Couldn't the gardener keep him out?" she said, quietly.
"Perhaps he belongs to the gardener. I'll go and see. I won't be a minute."
He sprang up and followed the dog, which crept away into the garden, looking around with its desolate, yellow eyes to see if danger were near it.
Allah—Allah—Allah in the night!
Mrs. Armine did not know that this song of the boatmen of Nubia was presently, in later days she did not dream of, to become almost an integral part of her existence on the Nile; but although she did not know this, she listened to it with an attention that was strained and almost painful.
"Al-lah—Al-lah—"
"And probably there is no God," she thought. "How can there be? I am sure there is none."
Abruptly Meyer Isaacson seemed to come before her in the darkness, looking into her eyes as he had looked in his consulting-room when she had put up her veil and turned her face towards the light. She shut her eyes. Why should she think about him now? Why should she call him up before her?
She heard a slight rustle near her, and she started and opened her eyes. By one of the French windows the dragoman Ibrahim was standing, perfectly still now, and looking steadily at her. He held a flower between his teeth, and when he saw that she had seen him, he came gracefully forward, smiling and almost hanging his head, as if in half-roguish deprecation.
"What did you say your name was?" Mrs. Armine asked him.
He took the flower from his teeth, handed it to her, then took her hand, kissed it, bent his forehead quite low, and pressed her hand against it.
"Ibrahim Ahmed, my lady."
She looked at his gold-coloured robe, at his European jacket, at the green and gold fringed handkerchief which he had wound about his tarbush, and which covered his throat and fell down upon his breast.
"Very pretty," she said, approvingly. "But I don't like the jacket. It looks too English."
"It is a present from London, my lady."
"Al-lah—"
Always the sailors' song seemed growing louder, more vehement, more insistent, like a strange fanaticism ever increasing in the bosom of the night.
"Where are those people singing, Ibrahim?" said Mrs. Armine.
She put his flower in the front of her gown, opening her cloak to do so.
"They seem to get nearer and nearer. Are they coming down the river?"
"I s'pose they are in a felucca, my lady. They are Noobian peoples. They always make that song. It is a pretty song."
He gently moved his head, following the rhythm of the music. Between the green and gold folds of his silken handkerchief his gentle brown eyes always regarded her.
"Nubian people!" she said. "But Luxor isn't in Nubia."
"Noobia is up by Aswân. The obelisks come from there. I will show you the obelisks to-morrow, my lady. There is no dragoman who understands all 'bout obelisks like Ibrahim."
"I am sure there isn't. But"—those voices of the singing sailors were beginning almost to obsess her—"are all the boatmen Nubians then?"
"Nao!" he replied, with a sudden cockney accent.
"But these that are singing?"
"I say they are Noobian peoples, my lady. They are Mahmoud Baroudi's Noobian peoples."
"Baroudi's sailors!" said Mrs. Armine.
She sat up straight in her chair.
"But Mahmoud Baroudi isn't here, at Luxor?"
Ibrahim's soft eyes had become suddenly sharp and bright.
"Do you know Mahmoud Baroudi, my lady?"
"We met him on the ship coming from Naples."
"Very big—big as Rameses the Second, the statue of the King hisself what you see before you at the Ramesseum—eyes large as mine, and hair over them what goes like that!"
He put up his brown hands and suddenly sketched Baroudi's curiously shaped eyebrows.
Mrs. Armine nodded. Ibrahim stretched out his arm towards the Nile.
"Those are his Noobian peoples. They come from his dahabeeyah. It is at Luxor, waiting for him. They have nuthin' to do, and so they make the fantasia to-night."
"He is coming here to Luxor?"
Ibrahim nodded his head calmly.
"He is comin' here to Luxor, my lady, very nice man, very good man. He is as big as Rameses the Second, and he is as rich as the Khedive. He has money—as much as that."
He threw out his arms, as if trying to indicate the proportions of a great world or of an enormous ocean.
"Here comes my gentleman!" he added, suddenly dropping his arms.
Nigel returned from the darkness of the garden.
"Hulloh, Ibrahim!"
"Hulloh, my gentleman!"
"Keeping your mistress company while I was gone? That is right."
Ibrahim smiled, and sauntered away, going towards the bank of the Nile. His golden robe faded among the little trunks of the orange-trees.
"It was the gardener's dog," said Nigel, letting himself down into his chair with a sigh of satisfaction. "I've made him feed the poor brute. It was nearly starving. That's why it came to us."
"I see."
"Al-lah!" he murmured, saying the word like an Eastern man.
He looked into her eyes.
"The first word you hear in the night from Egypt, Ruby, Egypt's night greeting to you. I have heard that song up the river in Nubia often, but—oh, it's so different now!"
During her long experience in a life that had been complex and full of changes, Mrs. Armine had heard the sound of love many times in the voices of men. But she had never heard till this moment Nigel's full sound of love. There was something in it that she did not know how to reply to, though she had the instinct of the great courtesan to make the full and perfect reply to the desires of the man with whom she had schemed to ally herself. She owed this reply to him, but she owed it how much more to something within herself! But there existed within him a hunger for which she had no food. Why did he show this hunger to her? Already its demonstration had tried her temper, but to-night, for the first time, she felt her whole being set on edge by it. Nevertheless, she was determined he should not see this, and she answered very quietly:
"I am hearing this song for the first time with you, so I shall always associate it with you."
He drew a little nearer to her. And she understood and could reply to the demand which prompted that movement.
"We must drink Nile water together, Ruby, Nile water—in all the different ways. I'll take you to the tombs of the Kings, and to the Colossi when the sun is setting. And when the moon comes, we'll go to Karnak. I believe you'll love it all as I do. One can never tell, of course, for another. But—but do you think you'll love it all with me?"
Mingled with the ardour and the desire there was a hint in his voice of anxiety, of the self-doubt which, in certain types of natures, is the accompaniment of love.
"I know I shall love it all—with you," she said.
She let her hand fall into his, and as his hand closed upon it she was physically moved. There was in Nigel something that attracted her physically, that attracted her at certain moments very strongly. In the life that was to come she must sweep away all interference with that.
"And some day," he said, "some day I shall take you to see night fall over the Sphinx, the most wonderful thing in Egypt and perhaps in the whole world. We can do that on our way to or from the Fayyūm when we have to pass through Cairo, as soon as I've arranged something for you."
"You think of everything, Nigel."
"Do you like to be thought for?"
"No woman ever lived that did not."
She softly pressed his hand. Then she lifted it and held it on her knee.
Presently she saw him look up at the stars, and she felt sure that he was connecting her with them, was thinking of her as something almost ideal, or, if not that, as something that might in time become almost ideal.
"I am not a star," she said.
He did not make any answer.
"Nigel, never be so absurd as to think of me as a star!"
He suddenly looked around at her.
"What do you say, Ruby?"
"Nothing."
"But I heard you speak."
"It must have been the sailors singing. I was looking up at the stars. How wonderful they are!"
As she spoke, she moved very slightly, letting her cloak fall open so that her long throat was exposed.
"And how beautifully warm it is!"
He looked at her throat, and sighed, seemed to hesitate, and then bent suddenly down as if he were going to kiss it.
"Al-lah!"
Almost fiercely the nasal voice of the singing boatman who gave out the solo part of the song of the Nile came over the garden from the river, and the throbbing of thedaraboukkehsounded loudly in their ears. Nigel lifted his head without kissing her.
"Those boatmen are close to the garden!" he said.
Mrs. Armine wrapped her cloak suddenly round her.
"Would you like to go down to the river and see them?" he added.
"Yes, let us go. I must see them," she said.
She got up from her chair with a quick but graceful movement that was full of fiery impetus, and her eyes were shining almost fiercely, as if they gave a reply to the fierce voices of the boatmen.
Nigel drew her arm through his, and they went down the little sandy path past the motionless orange-trees till they came to the bank of the Nile. Ibrahim was standing there, peeping out whimsically from his fringed and tasselled wrappings, and smoking a cigarette.
"Where are the boatmen, Ibrahim?" said Nigel.
"Here they come, my gentleman!"
Upon the wide and moving darkness of the river, a great highway of the night leading to far-off African lands, hugging the shore by a tufted darkness of trees, there came a felucca that gleamed with lanterns. The oars sounded in the water, mingling with the voices of the men, whose vague, uncertain forms, some crouched, some standing up, some leaning over the river, that was dyed with streaks of light into which the shining drops fell back from the lifted blades, were half revealed to the watchers above them in the garden.
"Here come the Noobian peoples!"
"I wonder what they are doing here," said Nigel, "and why they come up the river to-night. Whose people can they be?"
Ibrahim opened his lips to explain, but Mrs. Armine looked at him, and he shut them without a word.
"Hush!" she whispered. "I want to listen."
This was like a serenade of the East designed to give her a welcome to Egypt, like the voice of this great, black Africa speaking to her alone out of the night, speaking with a fierce insistence, daring her not to listen to it, not to accept its barbaric summons. A sort of animal romance was stirred within her, and she began to feel strongly excited. She heard no longer the name of Allah, or, if she heard it, she connected it no longer with the Christian's conception of a God, with Nigel's conception of a God, but perhaps with strange idols in dusky temples where are mingled crimes and worship. Her imagination suddenly rose up, gathered its energies, and ran wild.
The boat stayed opposite the garden.
"It must be meant for me, it is meant for me!" she thought.
At that moment she knew quite certainly that this boat had come to the garden because she lived in the garden, that it paused so that she might be sure that the music was directed to her, was meant for no one but her. It was not for her and Nigel. Nigel had nothing to do with it. He did not understand its meaning.
At last the boat moved on, the flickering spears of light on the water travelled on and turned away, the voices floated away under the stars till the night enfolded them, the light and the music were taken and kept by the sleepless mystery of Egypt.
"Shall we go into the villa, Ruby?" said Nigel, almost diffidently, yet with a thrill in his voice.
She did not answer for a moment, then she said,
"Yes, I suppose it is time to go to bed."
Nigel drew her arm again through his, and they went away towards the house, while Ibrahim looked after them, smiling.